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Sunday, February 17, 2013

Google Drive

I was introduced to Google Drive by a beta reader. He suggested using the drive so he can edit it there. At first, I had no idea what he was talking about. I kept asking him, nobody else will see it? Is it public? I really thought he was just going to put it on google+ or something and tell me what was wrong with it. I was completely off. I went onto the drive and found out how useful it really is.

At the top of your window there are all of the tabs. It has your name+ tab, search, images, maps, play, youtube, news, gmail then the drive. I honestly never once looked at that tab before this past week. It's crazy, I know. So all you do is click it and it takes you to your personal drive.

You can do so many things on here I don't even know where to start. I will simply mention what I have used since that is what I am familiar with. You upload a document. It doesn't matter how long, for example I uploaded my book which is fairly long and it went okay. Here's the tricky part that I couldn't figure out. You need to create a google document to get this to work.

I did it all wrong but I found out the best way. So, you click create and copy and paste your piece into the document area. SAVE IT. There is this share button. If you never click it, your drive will be completely private and only visible to you. Here's the great part, you CAN share it!

You click the lock button which means share. This brings you to a page that has privacy settings and you can add viewers, editors, commenters or people to just read it. If you are nervous you can also click a button that doesn't allow people to download the file. It's really secure.

So, you can add people to the folder. They will only see what is in that folder and only they can see it. Oh, you can also prevent them from adding people into the group. So like I said yesterday, I joined a critique group. I uploaded my book and added the three people to the accepted list. You have to add them by gmail so that restricts who can use it.

Once they are added you make settings for them. The first is editors. They are able to delete parts, add new parts and basically anything else they want. This gives them a ton of freedom. The next choice, which is what I use and prefer, is commenter. This lets them highlight parts and add a comment on the side. It is similar to what you can do to word documents. This is the best thing in my opinion. The last choice is viewers. This allows them to read the book but not write anything on it.

Here's another thing that I find extremely useful. When someone is looking at your work, it shows them with a green box. This means they are online. You can actually chat with them while they read your work. The best part is when you aren't online, when someone comments or edits your work, it sends you an email. I like this part because I know when I get home I will have feedback.

Last thing! When someone makes a comment on your work you can resolve it. This means if you are the owner of the document you can go in after people comment and correct it right there. Once you resolve whatever issue the comment goes away. This is useful because you know when you've fixed everything!

I haven't decided how I am going to move forward when editing. Since my document has different homes, I don't know whether I want to edit on the drive or have the drive open and edit in scrivener. Since I use scrivener to export, I feel like that might be the best choice. I also have it saved in word documents so that's a lot of editing. I have a feeling I am going to stick with scrivener but we shall see. I hope this helps you out a little!